Posted on 02/06/2006 5:02:42 PM PST by CobaltBlue
Ricky Nguyen and Mariama Lowe never really believed in evolution to begin with. But as they took their seats in Room CC-121 at Northern Virginia Community College on November 2, they fully expected to hear what students usually hear in any Biology 101 class: that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was true.
As professor Caroline Crocker took the lectern, Nguyen sat in the back of the class of 60 students, Lowe in the front. Crocker, who wore a light brown sweater and slacks, flashed a slide showing a cartoon of a cheerful monkey eating a banana. An arrow led from the monkey to a photograph of an exceptionally unattractive man sitting in his underwear on a couch. Above the arrow was a question mark.
Crocker was about to establish a small beachhead for an insurgency that ultimately aims to topple Darwin's view that humans and apes are distant cousins. The lecture she was to deliver had caused her to lose a job at a previous university, she told me earlier, and she was taking a risk by delivering it again. As a nontenured professor, she had little institutional protection. But this highly trained biologist wanted students to know what she herself deeply believed: that the scientific establishment was perpetrating fraud, hunting down critics of evolution to ruin them and disguising an atheistic view of life in the garb of science.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
That's a wild overstatement:
Icon of Obfuscation - Peppered MothsThe story of the peppered moth
FINE TUNING THE PEPPERED MOTH PARADIGM
Moonshine: Why the Peppered Moth Remains an Icon of Evolution
I don't have a problem with teaching it as an example of science gone wrong.
I do have a problem with that, because that's an inaccurate description.
Abiogenesis is probably best left to the chemists.
Even in biology, though, it's really not a part of evolution.
No, evolution does not imply progress.
Think about blind fish, parasites and such.
In one of the non-scientific meanings of the word, perhaps, as in "the evolution of Greek civilization". If it claimed that the word "evolution" meant "progress" in the context of biological change, then it's just wrong.
That is merely one meaning, not the only meaning. In root the word means to turn out, which I take to mean like bread dough. The same stuff is there all along, but it just looks and acts different.
They also use evolution in the science of linguistics to mean the diachronic change of the language. Whether the language improves with evolution is doubtful.
There's a difference between *evolution*, and biology in general. Abiogenesis is a valid topic in biology, but it's still a topic independent of evolution, pretty much by definition. Biological evolution deals with the process of replication -- no replication, no evolution. So whatever the process(es) might be which gave rise to the first replicating thing, they didn't involve evolutionary processes, because being "pre-replication", they were "pre-evolution" as well.
Thanks, Ichneumon, I knew I could count on you to set me straight! ;^)
But, still, why give creationists any ammunition? The article I linked from Whole Earth (Craig Holdrege) wasn't written by a creationist.
A longer version of the story, with photos, as printed in Elemente der Naturwissenschaft 70: 39-51, 1999
http://natureinstitute.org/txt/ch/moth.htm
But the jump from amino acids to self-replicating proteins is just too big, without more -- I think it leaves a false impression to say that it's not.
And it certainly gives ammunition to creationists.
That depends on what your goal is.
Conclusion from Holdrege's article - I think this is completely valid reasoning.
Conclusion
For decades the peppered moth has been a standard classroom and textbook example of evolution. Millions of students have learned this "living proof" of natural selection. The story they have been, and are, being told is most likely false, or to put it more mildly, filled with half-truths. This is not because teachers and writers are intentionally lying, or hiding and bending facts, but because the example is only brought to prove a point, so that complications appear extraneous to the argument (if not to the truth). Moreover, the idea of natural selection has become so ingrained into the modern mind that it can become like a pair of spectacles that one doesn't remove anymore. Concepts then become axiomatic and science ends up being promulgated in a dogmatic form. As a correlate, the complex and rich phenomena of nature degenerate, as it were, into mere instances of overriding principles. Instead of illuminating, the idea becomes, in Goethe's words, a "lethal generality" (Goethe 1995, p. 61).
This tendency toward solidification is not what keeps science alive. Vitality in science comes from researchers doubting conclusions, making new observations and constructing new experiments, from scientists thinking original ideas that break through the constrictions of dominant paradigms. Science teaching need not only serve the codified "body of knowledge." It can also serve ongoing exploration and the continual renewal of ideas. Since there is "more to melanism than meets the eye," peppered moth research can be an excellent teacher of the living scientific process.
How about evolution and survival of the fittest? Blind fish have evolved like that because they don't need to see in the dark underwater caves. When the strength of one modality decreases, other modalities become stronger.
http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/InNews/blindfish2004.html
Ohhh, objects...
Make me write bad checks, sweety...
Have I lost the thrust of this thread...?
Does it have one?
Absolutely.
My statements are always made with that as an a priori assumption.
Had we but world enough and...
Uh oh, it's gender ID time...
Are you a woman, woman?
OK, four hours since the article was posted, and no food fight.
To me, that means something. Probably something positive.
Maybe, for creationists, all they really want is "respect." I don't know exactly what that means, but maybe they don't really want more than to have their ideas and their sensibilities treated as something other than complete nonsense? (Multiculturalism and all that.)
Or maybe it's just a really boring article . . . .
Or maybe they just refuse to register with the WashPost to read it . . . .
Nahh. I've been keeping up with this topic, not too many followers, I should add, and it's a fruitful topic for further research.
It apparently doesn't provoke combat from the luddites, and that's a shame.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.